9 elements every Customer experience strategy should have

Unveiling the Mystery of CX strategy: Magic or Necessity?

11/06/2024; 4 min to read

What's the deal with customer experience strategy?

A customer experience strategy is basically like a roadmap to make sure your customers have a great time and keep coming back for more. It's all about creating awesome experiences at every step of the way!

When you're working on your customer experience strategy, make sure to get everyone in your organisation on board, not just the sales and support teams. It's all about teamwork to enhance the customer experience, so don't keep it separate from the rest of the company. Setting clear governance and clear responsibility is crucial, but remember, it's not a solo performance!

3 main components of customer experience

Qualtrics XM Institute  identified three main components of customer experience:

• Success

• Effort

• Emotion
  

Success

In the customer’s opinion, was the interaction successful? Did the interaction enable the customer to achieve what they had set out to achieve?

Your customer experiences should be driven by the objective to make your customers successful.

Effort

How much customer effort was involved in the interaction? Was it easy for the customer to interact with your business or did it take too much time, energy, and frustration?

High effort experiences do not leave your customers feeling too good, but low-effort experiences can cause your customers to keep coming back to do business with you again and again.

Emotion

What feelings did the customer go through during the interaction with your brand? What emotional outcome did the interaction create?

When deciding whether customers will remain loyal to a company and continue making purchases or if they will churn and cease doing business with the company, the emotional aspect of the customer experience holds more significance than success or effort.

Key takeaway: Let's infuse more emotion into customer experience and create a strategy that fosters loyalty.

So, here are 9 elements every Customer experience strategy should have

1. Define a vision

You need to define a vision and a set of values that guide your customer experience initiatives. These should be communicated to your entire organisation, across all departments. It should even guide your training and development initiatives.

2. Set governance

Implement suitable governance procedures to guarantee clear steering responsibilities. Appoint a CX leader to advocate for a customer-centric culture, as well as to lead and coordinate change and engagement initiatives throughout the organisation.

3. Build persona

To deliver experiences that resonate with your customers and increase retention, you need to  get into their minds. You need to understand their needs, expectations, goals, and challenges in order to empathise with them and create a personalised experience.

4. Collect feedback

Collect feedback from your customers. Not just about their overall experience with your brand, but also with regard to individual interactions. 

Make sure not to simply collect information for the sake of collecting it. You need to analyze it and take action, otherwise, your customers will feel like you do not care about their opinions and challenges.

5. Measure wisely

Measure the impact of your customer experience initiatives. Check whether you’re actually delivering experiences that match your vision. Tie everything to clear metrics.

You’ll also want to measure the results you are getting by creating positive experiences. You can look at metrics like CSAT and NPS giving perspective of satisfaction and loyalty but also customer retention rate and purchase frequency to get an idea of how you’re doing. If they end up falling short of your targets, you need to work on improving your experiences even further.

6. Map customer journeys

Customer journey mapping helps you understand the customer experience as a whole, but it also helps you understand experiences across individual touchpoints and interactions. It helps you identify gaps and areas for improvement.

7. Align with vision

Analyze your CX initiatives and check whether they align with your vision, values, and guidelines. Don’t just go ahead with ad hoc initiatives, make sure it all fits into your strategy.

8. Take actions

Implementing changes, improvements, or solutions based on feedback from customers is an essential part of customer experience management. Utilising different methods and tools such as prioritisation matrices, roadmaps, action plans, feedback loops, and follow-up meetings can help in effectively addressing customer painpoints.

9. Prioritise trainings

As your business evolves, so do your customers’ needs. You need to continuously train your agents |and your chatbots :)) to answer new questions and deal with new issues and challenges.

How can you implement this concept in the mindset and discipline of all employees?

Good strategy is very important, but its execution is even more important. To support that, the customer experience strategy needs to be supported by a solid system focusing on the strategy elements shown above.A Net Promoter System in place will cover you and ensure that all the strategy components work well together..

Constant communication and reviewing essential elements within the customer experience subject are also key. Your colleagues and/or employees need to hear about your customer experience mission in ways that relate to them and their everyday lives. Otherwise, trainings have a limited effect.

In industries like hospitality, it's not unusual to have a monthly theme centered around guest experiences and to start each shift with announcements and reminders regarding customer feedback.

While this idea is quite rare in other industries like business-to-business organizations, financial services, healthcare, or education, where customer experience guidance is not shared on a regular basis.

There are so many advantages to providing a rich customer experience communication. The CX Leader plays a key role, and he/she should be wisely supported by CX Champions across the organization.